Chapter 254 The Ex-Member for Rottenborough
POV: Sir Pembroke | Rookeries, various locations
I have been in the Rookeries for eleven days and I have not yet worked out what the Rookeries is, which is a problem I did not anticipate, because I understood the Rookeries as a concept before I arrived here and the concept I understood was a community of packless wolves and marginalized supernaturals operating outside Parliamentary authority in a specific part of south London, and that concept is accurate in its outline and completely inadequate to the reality.
The reality is that the Rookeries has the quality of a place that knows what it is, which is a quality that the institutions I have spent four hundred years inside have not had for a very long time, if they ever had it, the specific quality of a community that has decided what it is for and which is organized around that decision, and which produces in the people who live inside it the quality of people who know what they are doing and why they are doing it.
I find this irritating.
My name is Sir Pembroke, or was, the title having been stripped along with the position and the property and the Parliamentary membership in the twenty-two days since the blackmail files released and the specific contents of my file became the specific contents of every supernatural press outlet and several human ones, and the contents of my file are accurate, which is the thing that makes them unmanageable, because inaccurate contents can be disputed and accurate contents can only be survived, and I am in the process of surviving mine.
The crimes were real. I am not going to address this directly because this is not the context for direct address, but I am aware that they were real and that the people who committed those crimes, which is me, did so with the specific understanding of someone who believed the system would absorb them, which it had done for four hundred years, and which it stopped doing twenty-two days ago when the system's ability to absorb things was removed by a twenty-one-year-old with forty-four years of records and sixty-three distribution channels.
The Rookeries as accommodation is not what I expected. I expected significantly worse. What I have is a room above a Rookeries business that is clean and maintained and which has the quality of a space that has been prepared for habitation by people who understand that habitation requires certain things to be functional, and the room costs money I have less of than I had twenty-three days ago but which I still have some of, because stripping title and position and Parliamentary membership does not reach into the specific accounts that I maintain under names that are not my title, and the specific accounts are not in Parliament's jurisdiction to strip.
I have been attempting to be useful. This is the strategy I decided on after the first week, which is the strategy of finding the people who make decisions in this community and offering them the thing that makes me useful to them, which is the knowledge of four hundred years inside the institution they are fighting, the specific knowledge of how Parliament works and who the key relationships are and where the leverage points are and what the succession crisis is actually going to produce as opposed to what it appears it is going to produce.
The problem is that nobody wants it.
The people I approach receive me with the specific quality of people who have assessed the source of an offer and determined that the source contaminates the offer, that four hundred years of Parliamentary knowledge coming from someone who spent four hundred years using that knowledge in the ways my file documents is not a neutral resource but a poisoned one, and the poisoning is not about the knowledge itself but about what accepting help from me would mean for the people who accepted it.
I approach Callum Brennan on the fourteenth day, which is two days after I decide that approaching the person at the center is more efficient than trying the periphery, and I approach him in the Rookeries main street in the morning when he is moving between the shelter and the operational building and when he is accompanied by two pack members but not by his brother or Dante, which is the moment where the approach is most feasible.
"I can help you," I say. I say it directly, which is the correct register for approaching someone like Callum Brennan, who reads performance and indirection accurately and who responds better to the direct version. "I know Parliament's secrets. The ones that were not in the files. The older architecture of how things work, who is actually aligned with whom, what the succession candidates are planning that they have not put in any document."
He stops and he looks at me with the expression I have been receiving in various forms for twenty-two days, the expression of assessment conducted quickly and arriving at its conclusion without ceremony.
"We already know them," he says. He says it without cruelty, which makes it more final rather than less. "Silas's records go back two hundred years. Tom kept them for three more. Jack has been maintaining them for four." He looks at me with the direct quality that I have been told about and which is exactly what it was described as. "You're done."
He moves past me and the two pack members move past me and the street continues in the way streets continue when something has happened in them that the street itself does not register as significant.
I stand on the Rookeries street and I am four hundred years old and I am in a community I cannot contribute to and I have resources that nobody wants and I have knowledge that is already superseded and I am bitter in the specific way that people are bitter when the thing that made them valuable has been made redundant not through their failure but through someone else's success.
The bitterness is mine. I am clear about this. The clarity does not make it less bitter but it makes it accurate.
I go back to my room. I sit at the window that looks out over the street that I have been expelled from the institution that governed and think about what comes after the bitterness, which is not forgiveness, which is not redemption, which is simply the specific practical question of what a four-hundred-year-old disgraced former Parliament member does in a world that has moved past the architecture he spent four hundred years inside.
I do not have an answer yet.
The Rookeries street below the window continues in the quality I have been watching for fourteen days, the quality of a place that knows what it is for and which is going about the business of being that.